The ramblings of a pilgrim through time, space, and life.

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Out with the old liver, in with the new!

It has been an interesting day. I was awakened last night by the ringing telephone around 12:30 AM. It was Jan, my step-mother, informing me that my Dad and she were headed to Salt Lake City. They had received a phone call that Dad needed to head to the hospital. There was a liver coming to Salt Lake from Elko, Nevada.

Dad was right in his premonition that he would have a liver soon. Many people wait years and die without ever receiving a liver transplant. Dad had one within a few months. I don’t remember exactly how long it has been, but I think it is less than 6 months. Funny how things line up sometimes.

He went in for surgery about 8:30 AM this morning. I guess the liver had to arrive and they had to inspect it to make sure it was suitable for Dad. Can you imagine that scene? “Hmmm, Dr. do you concur? I do believe it is a liver. Shall we fry some to make sure? This thing is huge, are they sure it doesn’t belong to a horse? Where did I put that tape measure?”

It seems a bit morbid to think that somebody was just dying to give this liver to Dad. We don’t know what happened to the person who gave it up but one thing came out of the whole scenario, it is a big liver. Jan commented later that they had to trim quite a bit off. I never really considered that you could just trim it down to size. I don’t imagine many organs you can do that. What about a heart, it just seems it would not be the same after the trim.

The surgery was supposed to take 8 hours. But at 5:30 Jan called me to tell me they had not put the new liver in. What is up with that? Talk about milking the clock. I am sure they did not clock out for lunch and whatever else they were doing. I hope they did not sew an onion ring up inside.

I write this at about 5 hours after when they were supposed to be done and I just received another call that they just finished hooking up all the blood vessels and such but they had yet to do the bile ducts. The Dr. made a comment about doing a lot of trimming.

You must remember I am hearing all this information through chinese whispers. I am sure they do not really divulge everything that has taken place. There really must be a reason why the operation went 6 hours over (that is a 14 hour day, even if they did order in pizza and onion rings). Perhaps it was like the gall bladder removal where the blood vessels were thick and required quite a bit of effort to keep things leaking too much. Who knows. Perhaps they accidentally removed the stomach and had to put it back in before actually getting to the liver.

At any rate, the doctors tell us everything has gone well. That was at the last little break they took to come visit with Jan. He is supposed to be unconscious the rest of the night and will spend the next few days in ICU. We will have to see what happens.

In other news, I extracted 500 names from the indexing today. Just wanted to make sure I am familiar with all of it if I am going to be getting others to volunteer.